The Color Over Occam

by Jonathan Thomas

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  The Color Over Occam © 2013, 2012 Jonathan Thomas

  Foreword by S. T. Joshi

  Cover Art and Signature Sheet © 2013, 2012 Alex McVey

  Copyediting by Robert Mingee

  This edition © 2013, 2012 by Arcane Wisdom an imprint of Bloodletting Press

  Arcane Wisdom

  P. O. Box 130

  Welches, OR 97067

  www.miskatonicbooks.com

  arcanewisdom@me.com

  Book Design & Typesetting by Larry L. Roberts

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without the written permission of the author and publisher.

  First Edition

  With love to Angel for a thousand Sundays and counting, to Derrick for two leaps of faith and counting, and to the bygone Taurus of happy associations.

  —Jonathan Thomas

  Of all men’s miseries the bitterest is this, to know so much and to have control over nothing.

  —Herodotus

  Foreword

  The Color over Occam is the latest and most distinguished work by an author whose contributions to Lovecraftian and general weird fiction will, I am confident, be received with increasing admiration in the coming years. Jonathan Thomas has already established a reputation as one of the most distinctive weird writers of the new millennium, and his critical and popular renown can only ascend with the passage of time.

  The course of Thomas’s literary career is more than a little curious. He has lived for many years in H. P. Lovecraft’s hometown of Providence, R.I., and has no doubt soaked up plenty of Lovecraftian atmosphere in the process. He issued a slim book from a local publisher, Stories from the Big Black House (1992), but it sold poorly and did nothing for his reputation. He appears to have taken a holiday from publishing for a good decade and a half. Then, in 2007, after I gave a lecture on Lovecraft at a Brown University conference on pulp magazines, Thomas shyly approached me, saying that he had some new stories on hand for me to read. I am, quite frankly, bombarded frequently with would-be authors wishing to gain my imprimatur for their work, and it is rare that such an imprimatur is justified; but I am always eager to discover genuine new talents in weird fiction, so I accepted Thomas’s batch of stories with at least the hope that there might be some merit in them.

  The first story, “Eben’s Portrait,” produced in me a delicious jolt of terror such as I had not felt since I first read the work of Thomas Ligotti. The other stories were no disappointment, either. I was already of the opinion that a bright new voice in weird fiction had emerged, and it was not long before Thomas had amassed enough work to form a substantial story collection. Midnight Call and Other Stories (2008) emerged from Hippocampus Press to considerable critical renown. It did not in fact have any stories that were obviously Lovecraftian, but certain motifs—in particular, the lurking presence of ancient “gods” on the underside of civilisation—clearly pointed to the fact that Lovecraft was one of several literary influences that could be detected in his work, although that work is fundamentally original in reflecting Thomas’s idiosyncratic, and perhaps sardonic, worldview.

  When I solicited a story from Thomas for my anthology Black Wings: New Tales of Lovecraftian Horror (2010), he responded with the substantial novelette “Tempting Providence,” a delightful narrative that fused humour, satire, and horror in a distinctive amalgam. Its half-comic premise—the ghost of H. P. Lovecraft is seen at the site of his last residence, 66 College Street, a site now occupied by the architecturally grotesque and almost non-Euclidean List Art Building of Brown University—served as the springboard for a wide-ranging scenario that brought both Lovecraft himself and his native city to life, and not without some gruesome shudders along the way. The story was one of several lengthy tales in Thomas’s second collection, Tempting Providence and Other Stories (2010).

  Even before that volume emerged, I was thrilled to hear that Thomas was working on a full-scale novel in the Lovecraftian mode. Thomas is a slow and painstaking worker (he still writes the initial drafts of his tales in longhand), and I was forced to keep my impatience in check until he had finished the work to his satisfaction. When, at last, he sent the typescript of The Color over Occam to me, I was reasonably confident that it would be a competent work of fiction—but I was not fully prepared for its compelling, almost hypnotic power.

  And yet, the chief virtues of Thomas’s fiction—deft, even loving characterisation; complex, multi-layered plots that are always skilfully elaborated; an ability to vivify his chosen setting, whether it be a teeming metropolis or the untenanted wilderness; a pungently satirical, almost jaundiced view of human foibles and failings—is ideally suited to the novel. So it is no surprise that The Color over Occam is the success that it is—a narrative that takes Lovecraft’s “The Colour out of Space” as a stepping-stone to a dense and slowly unfolding panorama of horror.

  I can unhesitatingly state that The Color over Occam is not only one of the finest Lovecraftian novels ever written—its only competitors may be Colin Wilson’s The Mind Parasites (1967), William Browning Spencer’s Résumé with Monsters (1995), and Donald Tyson’s Alhazred (2006)—but one of the finest weird novels of any kind written in the past fifty years. Its culminating scene, in the sewers of Occam (the new name, in Thomas’s conception, of Lovecraft’s Arkham), is as gripping a tableau as any in contemporary weird fiction.

  I daresay we will hear much more of Jonathan Thomas in the years to come. For now, we can enjoy both his stories and this first novel as proof that he has already delivered on the promise of his early work.

  —S. T. Joshi

  1

  For years, people had complained of the tap water’s “Gorman taste.” Not exactly swampy, and not exactly salty. A vague but chronic impurity. Monthly testing by the state Water Resources Authority always came back negative for various microbes and pollutants. The state tried blaming any taint on clogged or rusty municipal pipes, and local government, hard pressed to cover the routine demands of infrastructure, sidestepped liability by blaming homeowners’ antique plumbing or fussy small-town imaginations.

  From where I was sitting, the water seemed fine, but we had only compass, stars, and full moon to steer by, and no instruments to measure contamination. Somewhere below us, in black depths beyond range of my camcorder’s night vision and zoom lens, crumbled the stone walls and cellars of Aylesbury, Clark’s Corners, Pocumtuc, and Whately, in fact all the valley enclosing Gorman County, submerged during the Depression to safeguard a water supply for its burgeoning neighbors.

  At thoughts of all those Yankee and Native spirits, lo these many decades, who might object to a lake atop their old haunts, it puzzled me that rumors were spreading only now of corpse-lights in the Gorman County Reservoir. Our informants were a romantic couple who shouldn’t have been anyplace along the after-hours shoreline of high-security “public property,” and a motorist on the ring road that skirted the wooded acreage around the reservoir. Not much to navigate by, but Wil, manning the outboard, claimed those meager l
ines of sight were enough.

  Wil (in militant preference to Wilbur) Rice was the ideal, if not only, man for this job. Permission to overnight out here was a moot point because he was a ranger for the Department of Parks and Recreation, and Gorman was his workaday turf. For all I knew, he was on the clock right now. Not that I cared. He’d never earn a cent in the organization where he and I were 100% of the active membership. In most clubs, I surmise, deadwood surrounds a diligent individual or two. Anyway, Wil referred to this excursion as a few hours’ getaway, maybe his last, before fearsomely pregnant Lucinda had the twins.

  We couldn’t have asked for nicer weather. The midsummer day’s heat had gentled without the help of any breeze. Except for the rippling wake from our motor at low throttle, the surface was smooth as lacquer, and its reflection of too many stars and rising, swollen moon brought the sky imposingly close. Wil asked if I’d noticed the occasional flash of meteor and I nodded, although I hadn’t. The undulant hilltops, of a drabber black than the cosmos above them, were foremost on my mind, with vagrant curiosity at how mountainous they might have loomed before the flood. A diffuse strip of light rendered the southern rim marginally more distinct. The wan glow from our woebegone little burg! As if the punchline to all the expense and sacrifice here had been written in electricity.

  At the outset, submerging a county for the primary benefit of our expanding hometown had seemed logical, albeit callous. But in the twenty years before the reservoir filled to capacity, factories flourishing during World War II went bust or sought lower overhead in Dixie. The town completely lost its economic footing a quarter century later, when reckless yuppies mismanaged its ivy-mantled university into dissolution. What campus halls the wrecking ball spared became office space or condos, as did the sturdier defunct mills. Due to these and more shadowy associations from which the town strove to distance itself, it resorted to the dramatic but impotent step of changing its name to “Occam.” This simply amounted to a phonetic New England respelling of its old name, and the town’s baffling new identification with a medieval philosopher monk, if anyone besides myself had even heard of William of Occam (especially after the university folded), did nothing to turn it around. Bucolic Gorman County had been demolished in the service of postindustrial blight.

  So why would the indignant souls of the valley wait till this late stage to act up? In the best-case scenario, Wil and I, representing OGAM, were going to amass clues, and air them on the next OGAM Chronicles, the public-access cable digest of the Occam Ghostly Anomalies Monitors.

  The motor cut out and Wil announced, “We’re in the ballpark.” I smiled at visions of antediluvian ballplayers directly below us, batting ectoplasmic homers through the murk. An obscenely plump Jersey mosquito whined by, which I ignored because they were supposedly fructivores. Then it looped back and dove at me. What the hell? I squashed it between loudly clapping hands and winced at both the echoes from the hills and my blood-soaked palms. Wil hadn’t seen the attack and cast peevish doubts on my description of goliath insect menace. Grossly bad form, to make impulsive racket in our painstaking business.

  I doused my hands clean in the lake, toweled them dry, and transferred my minidisk recorder from plastic pouch to the shelf across minutely nodding bow. I clicked on the mic to catch any electronic voice phenomena (EVPs to the cognoscenti) and peered into camcorder LCD display while slowly scanning back and forth, to catch activity hidden in the infrared range on or under placid surface. Into a ringbound notebook Wil scribbled moment-to-moment updates about the wind, temperature, humidity, and rare traffic on the snippet of road exposed between two hillsides. Embarrassing to admit how often experts confuse headlights for more cryptic orbs! After fifteen minutes, we secured the equipment and proceeded elsewhere in our “ballpark,” and mutely watched and documented for the same duration. We were anglers in a rarefied sense, biding patient hours on the off-chance of reeling in prize data.

  Twice more Wil reoriented us, and accustomed as we were to wasted vigils, getting the fidgets in the thick of all-night monotony was only natural. Poor Wil! About to burst with the need to talk, judging by furrowed brow and lips shaping silent words. Much as he deserved a break from Lucinda’s hormonal bouts of temper and distress, guilt still ate at him for leaving her in the company of mere friends. Never mind that she’d dragged him to the fertility clinic, despite his philosophic acceptance that after three years of normal efforts, offspring were not meant to be. On second thought, maybe just as well we honored the ghost-hunter’s code of silence.

  When iridescence streaked the water a stone’s throw from our prow, I was, sorry to say, incredulous. I had to verify it wasn’t the reflection of a car and aimed the camcorder too late. Wil was likewise dumbfounded, but blinked his astonishment away and scrawled rapidly. His notes affirmed we’d both felt initially topsy-turvy during that and each succeeding “corpse-light,” as if on the underside of a surface, looking up rather than down, into someone else’s world.

  We made for the brightness, nice and easy, afraid to rev the motor and disturb something that, for once, was discernible without aid of frame-by-frame or audio-filter scrutiny. We were too excited and focused for any anxiety about supernatural encounters. No investigators worth their salt feared harm from ghosts, and to be fair, a well-respected theory discounted will-o’-the-wisps as methane gas and oxidation from rotting plants.

  Whatever this was, it winked out before Wil killed the motor, but rekindled, right beside our port stern, a minute later. My viewfinder revealed that the coruscation only seemed to lie on the surface through some trick of refraction. It was actually fathoms below, and whenever I adjusted the zoom within a hairsbreadth of clarity, it retreated deeper again. Was I, or my lens at least, really chasing a classic will-o’-the-wisp? Wil broke our vow of silence. “Why do you keep futzing with that? The light’s two feet away from you.”

  “Is it?” My tone may have come off as snide, but it did the job of nipping talk in the bud. Better that than marring any minidisk or camcorder EVPs. Obviously the view from where Wil sat was distorted. My figurative descent, meanwhile, had grown more frustrating and more mesmerizing. I dismissed a silly impression that the light was coercing me, or my mind anyhow, to follow it. According to his notes, Wil had also expected to meet transient, flitting orbs at best, and didn’t know what to make of something so persistent and shapeless. He didn’t mention the problem of its color, which I found impossible, between infrared vision and the dark water, to specify. From second to second, my eyes registered white or violet or beige or silver or one that never lasted long enough to name. And further inspection proved me wrong about the anomaly’s lack of form. I had a steep, almost vertical perspective on a translucent plane of irregular outline, which hovered a while, then instantly tilted to another angle, at a lower depth, and with a different outline.

  My breathing, it dawned on me, had become hoarse and labored, as if my lungs were battling the pressure at the depth pictured on the LCD. One more refocus, and the glow of planar section intimated a circular structure below it, holding out amidst the choking silt. A farmer’s well? Had my humble camcorder delved straight to the bottom? Peripheral motion I took to be fish, and then a curious trout bumbled up to the wall of color, which shifted to embed the fish halfway through it. The dismayed trout sped away, and a patch of brightness went with it, like a badge on its flank. Whether or not I was watching signs of ghostly sentience or the supernatural at all, I’d never heard of corpse-lights hitching a ride on a fish. I wanted to pan away from the phenomenon, to record any man-made context of walls or foundations, but couldn’t bring myself. The trout was putting on a better show of free will. My hands were clenched fast around the camcorder, as if stuck in a trap. Was this how the onset of panic attack felt?

  At a tap on my shoulder, I drew a wheezing, convulsive breath. I whipped around, primed for an emergency. Wil’s eyes were darting sidelong left and right, and the air whistled anxiously through his nose. He’d never acted ca
gey like this on previous outings and didn’t explain himself in his notes, but it had to concern more than the compass in his outheld hand. The needle pointed toward the stern instead of north and was bouncing wildly up and down, clicking like an insect against the glass cover. Magnetic flux was typically welcome as a calling card of the otherworldly and did help rule out the influence of swamp gas. Which was also good news in terms of our water quality, I reckoned. Reservoirs weren’t supposed to belch luminous methane, were they? I nodded at Wil, who pocketed the compass and dug out his cellphone. Was he getting jittery out of worry for Lucinda? My attention had returned to the LCD. Had to blink, and ogled over the side. The seam of flexing brightness lay on the surface again, and its image in the display was sharp, as if I’d never touched the zoom.

  This place was unsafe. I couldn’t articulate why. Nor could I ignore the urge to decamp. Wil and I were rattled, and to put a more dignified face on it, I persuaded myself we were recoiling on an instinctive level, where discretion overruled valor. The mysterious light faded and reignited a dozen yards off the starboard bow. Its scintillations may have tried beckoning us, but we were in tacit agreement that this expedition was finished. We hurriedly stowed the equipment, and Wil broke the useless silence. “The wife called. Didn’t leave a message. So it might be nothing. Or else she takes for granted I know it must be important or she wouldn’t phone at all.” And I had relegated playing “mind games” to the dustbin of the ’60s!

  Thankfully, Wil changed the subject and apologized for doubting me about the bloodthirsty Jersey mosquito. He’d flattened a couple that had landed on him, as well as three that were battening on my back and shoulders. Hadn’t I felt him slap them off? I hadn’t even flinched, he informed me. I could only shake my head and josh lamely about my dedication to videography.